I reserve my judgement on this gossip. Things very nearly as unlikely are said about DEC and IBM, or any clannish company.
All the same, there is a proverb about straws in the wind...
***
My suspicions weigh very heavily on me, like the pressure of deep water.
But am I suffering from insight or from insanity? Patterns which connect up too many things can be suspect (and here I remember that VDU radiation has also been claimed to induce brain tumours or suicidal depression). I freely admit that I do not possess anything like statistically reliable evidence. If I had more friends, I might be able to offer more examples than those of Janine, and of Jo Pennick, Helen Weir, and certain unknowns at a school near my Berkshire home.
I have spoken of Janine. The others came later.
We contract programmers lead a nomadic life, drifting from company to company, isolated from the permanent staff who resent our skills and high fees. Sometimes we exchange shop-talk in bars (we mostly drink too much). And so I came to hear...
Mrs. Pennick was a heavy user of Deepword 2.2, in the same condition and for much the same reasons as Janine. She died of complications soon after giving birth to her Peter. With Ms. Weir it was the Deepcalc 1.14 spreadsheet, a daughter called Rose, and unexplained suicide a month or so later. The unknowns remain unknown and I have no real right to guess at their software heritage. But a dreadful conviction washes over me whenever I see (as so frequently I do) these young children of the VDU age, who presumably have parents or a parent somewhere, and who strongly resemble the unrelated Sara and Peter and Rose. Very strongly indeed.
The polite word, I am told, is “exophthalmic.”
I only advance a hypothesis. I dare not commit myself to admitting belief. Even the ’em research is still very far from being conclusive. But suppose, just suppose... That little seaport in Massachusetts has long had an odd reputation, it seems. The term “in-breeding” was often used of its staring natives. Could this conceivably have been a result of deliberate policy?
Deepnet, says a typical publicity flyer which comes to hand. Time for your business to move out from the shallows. Take your computer projections below the surface, with software that goes a little deeper. Software from by the sea...
Taking a hint from the eerie underwater imagery of so many Deepnet products (even their word processor’s title screen is decorated with stylised waves), I find “in-breeding” shifting in my mind’s eye to “breeding,” and again to “breeding back,” and I remember that all life arose in the sea. I also remember, unwillingly, the stitches that closed what might conceivably have been slits to left and right of the hours-old Sara’s throat.
Very cautiously I allow myself to admit that the ’em radiation pattern of a computer display must depend in part on the program driving that display; and to acknowledge that research into this radiation and its biological impact goes back thirty years; and to wonder whether, for twelve years or more, software from a certain source might not intentionally have had certain effects on pregnant users. Are the children of Innsmouth growing up all around us?
Deepnet. Great new applications from the old, established market leader. Software for the new generation. Talk to us on Internet at innsmouth@deepnet.com.
One last niggling point concerns my daughter’s Undersea Quest, a best-selling computer game which has won many awards for excitement untainted with violence. Players learn to progress not by attacking but by co-operating with the huge, friendly and vaguely frog-like creatures which populate the game world. It is all very ecologically sound. A full virtual-reality version is promised before long.
Something in the watery glimmer of its graphics made me hunt out the instruction leaflet and look up the makers’ name. PSP: Pelagic Software Products, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deepnet Communications, Inc. Here is their message to the new generation.
At this point in my speculations I was struck with a vivid image of Janine telling me with her usual twinkle that I am just a thoughtless, sexist beast. Fancy imagining all these terrible consequences for pregnant women, “the weaker vessel,” while giving hardly a thought to my own very much longer hours working with Deepnet development software. Twelve years now, at least. Might there not be accumulated effects in my body, my brain?
I am terribly frightened that I may already know the answer to that question. In a few years, when the time comes, when her time comes, it will perhaps destroy me unless I first destroy myself. My hands and forehead are unpleasantly damp as I type these final sentences into the edit screen of Deepword 6.01.
Deepnet. Bringing together the best of the old and new generations. The software family that rides the tide of tomorrow.
Breeding, and in-breeding. These insights come in a single hot moment. Turning to look again at Sara, I see those big protruding eyes fixed raptly on the screen, and her broad face tinged a soft, delicate green by its light. Overwhelmingly I can imagine the salt-sea smell of her, and I love her and I want her.
TO SEE THE SEA
by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
WHEN THE BUS reached the top of the hill that finally brought the ocean into view, Susan turned to me and grinned.
“I can see the sea!” she said, sounding about four years old. I smiled back and put my arm round her shoulders, and we turned to look out of the window. Beyond the slight reflection of our own faces the view consisted of a narrow strip of light grey cloud, above a wide expanse of dark grey sea. The sea came up to meet a craggy beach, which was also grey.
The driver showed no sign of throwing caution to the winds and abandoning his self-imposed speed limit of thirty miles an hour, and so we settled ourselves down to wait. The ride had already involved two hours of slow meandering down deserted country lanes. Another thirty minutes wouldn’t kill us.
We could at least now see what we had come for, and as we gazed benignly out of the window I could feel both of us relax. True, the sea didn’t look quite as enticing as it might at, say, Bondi Beach, and the end of October was possibly not the best time to be here, but it was better than nothing. It was better than London.
In the four months Susan and I had been living together, life had been far from sweet. We both worked at the same communications company, an organisation run on panic and belligerence. It ought to have been an exciting job, but every day at the office was like wading through knee-high mud in a wasteland of petty grievances and incompetence. Every task the company undertook was botched and flawed: even the car park was a disaster. Built in the shape of a wedge, it meant that anyone at the far end had to get all those parked between them and the exit to come and move their cars before they could leave. About once a fortnight our car wouldn’t start, despite regular visits to the world’s least conveniently situated garage.
The flat we had moved into was beautiful, but prey to similar niggling problems. The boiler, which went out twice a day, was situated below the kitchen, so we had no hot water to wash up with. Lightbulbs in the flat went at forty-minute intervals, each turning out to be some bizarre Somalian make which was unavailable in local stores. The old twonk who lived underneath us managed to combine a hardness of hearing that required his television to play at rock concert volume with a sensitivity that led him to shout up through the floor if we so much as breathed after eleven o’clock.